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Charities Bill [Lords]

In a minute, but not just yet. I will willingly do so when I have finished this section of my speech. This will be nothing other than the application of modern morals and existing orthodoxy to religion. That is pretty worrying for a charity whose ultimate authority is a 2,000-year-old book—and that is only the New Testament. Many charities are based on much older authority even than that. I have reason to be sceptical. In the past, I was involved with an application to the Charity Commission for a hospice for babies in the north of the country. It was a very beautiful vision that small, highly disabled children should be able to avail themselves of care in that hospice while their parents obtained respite. Nobody in the world could say that that was not a wonderful idea. The hospice, which was to be funded not by national resources but by charitable donation, was to be run under the auspices of Life, the political wing of which campaigns against abortion. That charitable endeavour, which was, I am pleased to say, ultimately successful, had to go through many hoops to get its status. That alerts me—